The Ties That Bind

By Ken Tucker

Published: December 22, 2002

THE THOUSAND WELLS

Poems.

By Adam Kirsch.

76 pp. Chicago:

Ivan R. Dee. $18.95.

Steely technical skill often contradicts the tender feelings and humility invoked throughout Adam Kirsch's first poetry collection. In ''A Love Letter,'' he asserts, ''all my powers, poetic, analytical, / Cannot do justice to the theme,'' but it's actually the stilted rhymes (''glosses / colossus''; ''momentous /portentous'') and the familiarity of images like ''love waxes and wanes, / But, like the hide-and-go-seek of the moon, / It is only hiding, never really gone'' that prevent Kirsch from sustaining his meditations on romantic love, city life and religion.

More than half of the poems in ''The Thousand Wells'' consist of serial rhyming quatrains -- rectangles of verse laid out like displays of neat bow ties. Here is an example of one, from ''Arcadia (Autumn)'':

This Sunday morning,

unobservant pairs

Of lovers, in each other's eyes complete,

Stroll arm in arm the

asphalt thoroughfares,

Or stop a while by a

secluded seat.

It strikes me immediately that these lovers are, contrary to the loping first-line adjective, very observant of what matters to them most: each other, and a place to sit -- well, unobserved. Furthermore, Kirsch pulls us out of this cozy scene in the third line, initially by straining for a rhyme for ''pairs'' (does the coyly quaint ''asphalt thoroughfares'' really add anything that the more colloquial ''sidewalks'' could not handle, conveying the lovers and the reader more briskly toward the poet's goal?) and then by insisting on narratively deadening syntax (wouldn't you or I, even if forced by a formalist poet with a pistol to use such language, still be inclined to say ''stroll the asphalt thoroughfares arm in arm''?).

Kirsch tends to use puffy adjectives that inflate an image unnecessarily, or seem just a bit off -- or both. In the very next quatrain of that same poem, he writes: ''Mothers in thrall to their imperial / Children are patient with unjust demands.''

In a setting that is otherwise plebian and pastoral, ''imperial'' is jarring; compare Kirsch's strategy with Mary Karr's use of the same word in a poem from her collection ''Viper Rum,'' as she describes her ailing mother sitting on the sofa watching TV: ''Her bearing's still imperial / but each day she fades a little.'' There, ''imperial'' is used for poignance, and the suggestion of eroded dignity; Kirsch, on the other hand, is searching for something to rhyme with an end-word that's comin' 'round his poem's bend in the next line -- ''animal.'' And besides, isn't ''imperious'' what he really means?

Unlike the poets whose verse he often emulates -- Keats, Byron, Tennyson -- there's scant dash, or the momentary respite of playfulness, in Kirsch's poetry. Even the occasion of watching a Marx Brothers movie with a lover -- an activity the excitable yet guilty Kirsch finds ''careless and animal'' -- becomes an admonitory lesson, one intended to ''teach us to reject / The easy way of saying what we mean; / Our virtuosic back-and-forth routine / Is just as loving, just as indirect.'' Kirsch's Margaret Dumont-like severity would certainly lend new gravitas to, say, Groucho's sung paradox, ''Hello, I must be going.''

Periodically, the poet yields to the messiness and mystery of emotion and creates effective lyric poetry, even as he insists, ''The substances of things unseen / Are trying to tell us what they mean.'' Kirsch is best when he invokes God and faith: in ''Balsam,'' he offers the moving expostulation that gives his collection its title -- ''O Father, let / Your thirsty one know the redeeming taste / Of the thousand wells that stand around him in the waste''; the final poem, a kind of evening prayer entitled ''Going to Bed,'' is also eloquent. But too much of ''The Thousand Wells,'' with its solemn ''odes after Horace,'' its blithe condescension to the subjects of the director Michael Apted's documentary ''42 Up'' and its yearning for ancient times of moral clarity -- ''Brief brightness, till their grandsons brought the night / In which we still wander'' -- is fussily pious and dismissive of the simple effectiveness of demotic language.